The present invention relates to interactive animation techniques that adaptively select the detail with which a scene is presented.
Animation techniques have been proposed that adaptively select a level of detail by using a previous scene's rendering time as an estimate of a current scene's rendering time. A scene's rendering time at a given level of detail is the time necessary to obtain data defining an image with that level of detail so that the image can be presented. Because the previous scene and the current scene are often similar, the previous scene's rendering time at a given level of detail often provides a good estimate of the current scene's rendering time at the same level of detail. The scenes can be defined at several possible levels of detail. If a scene is rendered too slowly for smooth animation, a level with less detail can be chosen for the next scene. If a scene is rendered more quickly than necessary for smooth animation, a level with greater detail can be chosen for the next scene. Determining a level of detail in this way involves no additional computation that might affect animation rates and can be applied to any rendering techniques on any machine presenting animated scenes.